


luminous beings

by delia-pavorum (delia_pavorum)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: But it might be hard to get through the sad parts, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Force Ghost Ben, Grief/Mourning, Immediately Post-TROS, Internal Conflict, Just working through our feelings, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey's grief is parallel to mine after watching TROS, The first half of this story feels very heavy, Then it gets pretty hopeful, Touches on Death, Turmoil, grief processing, like at all, rey is not in a good place
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:08:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27103981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delia_pavorum/pseuds/delia-pavorum
Summary: She'd thought she’d known loneliness before. The years on Jakku. Touching the reflective surface of the cave on Ahch-To. Aching for her parents. For answers.She is off Jakku now. She has her answers.Andthisloneliness, the loneliness of lost opportunity, of a future foretold but never realized, this is the most unbearable thing of all.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 22
Kudos: 93





	luminous beings

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there. It's been awhile.
> 
> I wanted to share a little about my journey with this fic, if that's alright. 
> 
> I wrote the first part of this story in January 2020, in the weeks following my viewing of The Rise of Skywalker (how appropriate it feels to call it a "[viewing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viewing_\(funeral\))".) And my goal was to ultimately make it happy and hopeful and end with sexy times and put a new spin on the godawful Tattooine scene. I was able to depict the grief easily enough, but I stalled when I got to the part that was supposed to be happy. Nothing about this _felt_ happy. I wasn't happy. And it felt odd to transition from grief to joy so easily. 
> 
> And that was the most important part to me - showing the grief that Rey _must_ have felt, even though we were denied any sign of it in the actual movie. I took the Rey that we saw in the film, her blank stare and her hollow smile, and I gave her a devastating internal monologue. I tried to accurately depict her shock and her torment at the loss of her soulmate, while also connecting it to her mannerisms and actions in the film. This was my way of explaining the disconnect between what we saw versus how she must have felt.
> 
> Since those early days, when I wrote the "sad parts" as I call them, I've come to terms with the movie and with the loss of any proper resolution or character development or relationship development we would have hoped for and I've found it easier to reach the "happy parts" of the story. I've still divided it into two parts and I'm still working on making the "happy parts" just right. But if you like what I did with the first chapter and you'd still be interested in reading more, please let me know.
> 
> This was heavy for me to write - very heavy. It was also very cathartic. I hope it feels the same for you.

* * *

The moment he is gone she forgets how to grieve.

The first and only thing she feels is pain, sharp and unyielding, like she has been run through by a lightsaber right in the soft spot at the base of her neck. 

The pain fades quickly and is replaced instead by a hollowness that spreads from the centre of her chest outwards; an implacable coldness that consumes her quickly. She feels her face ease from its tormented grimace into something that might have almost been considered serene if it didn’t feel so much like a brumal death from within. She exhales softly, a light breath released from lips that have gone numb. 

Her hands dazedly pat the soft material of his tunic, still warm from his body, as though she has somehow just missed him. As though she’ll still make contact with a solid form underneath and within. 

Instead, all she encounters is the scrabbled ground beneath the fabric. There is no warm, breathing, living man within. It is now just an overlay for the hard unyielding rock below. 

Had it truly been just moments before that she had held him in her arms, legs spread across his, their chests touching? 

Was it really only seconds prior where their lips had met, held and captured, his mouth moving against her own? The feel of his fevered breath expelling from his nose and hitting her cheek as they desperately, awkwardly tasted each other for the first time? His arms hefting her, holding her, crushing her to him? 

Had it even really happened? 

For a moment she wonders if maybe she is dead again. 

Maybe she is _still_ dead. 

Maybe she was always dead? 

The feeling is the same, after all. The feeling of being trapped in that horrid liminal space where she had screamed and screamed in isolated terror, her voice singular amongst the endless stars; that inky blackness symbolizing a blank eternity.

Her throat feels raw, raw like she is still screaming although her face does not move aside from the slow descent of her eyelids, blink after painful blink. 

Her breath comes out in short bursts as she scrambles up on shaky legs. At the last second she reaches down and grasps the shirt still on the ground, crumpling it up and sticking it under her arm. Her feet feel like leaden weights, knees wobbling, the coldness in her chest beginning to feel like an icy burn. 

And she starts to move. 

The oppressive force of her uncooperative legs makes every step an excruciating test of will, but somehow she perseveres through every sparking passage and up every crumbled rock. Out to the X-Wing, which she climbs into. She ignores the presence of the TIE so close to her own ship. She cannot bring herself to see it, to think of it. 

There is no living now, for her; there are no conscious decisions. There is only the patterns that have been ingrained in her since childhood. 

Helmet on. Controls switched. Buttons pushed. Handles grasped. Ship flying. Atmosphere approaching. 

None of it feels real and at the same time she is experiencing a sort of hyper reality. Every action makes a different part of her ache. She is aware of nothing and too much all at once – how the ridged handles of the controls bruise her fingers, the seat scrapes roughly against her back, the folds of Ben’s tunic press deeply against the insides of her thighs. And the cold prevails. 

_I left him there. I left him there. I left him there._

_There was nothing to leave. There was nothing to leave._

Opposing thoughts war in her head; they are the only words she can form in a mind that is now just as cold and silent as the rest of her. 

The silence is so profound it causes her to feel out of depth, even in her own thoughts. There is no longer anything to anchor her; no shared presence to lean upon. Even when the Bond was closed, she had still been able to feel him. A light, however dim, shining beneath a closed door.

There is only darkness now. 

_I left him there. There was nothing to leave._

Both are true. Neither are true. 

She navigates her way back to Ajan Kloss in the same way she got off Exegol. The same instinct that has driven her since before she can remember, the instinct that now has a name and a purpose. The instinct borne from the ugliness within her. From the evil within her. 

Piloting down to the soft, green terrain, so green it hurts her eyes, she executes a perfect landing.

She does not notice. 

Throwing the helmet off, she leaps from the X-Wing into the midst of a celebration. There has been a defeat of sorts; all rejoice. Rey feels her coldness start to alter the periphery of her vision. It's becoming darker around the edges now; harder to focus. 

A joyous mechanical noise captures her attention. Happy beeps. She looks down at BB-8, communicating with her. 

Her face does something, a quirk that resembles a smile. An acknowledgment that there is a friend present and that they are experiencing joy. She crouches down to touch the cool metal of the droid’s surface. 

Her hands tingle and burn. 

Straightening again, she walks woodenly through the crowd, looking for no one and nothing. Seeing only one face in front of her; the one she had seen last. 

_I left him there._

The silence is driving her mad. 

Her eyes catch on familiar faces approaching. She allows herself to be drawn into an embrace. The touch – chest to chest – feels like it erases the last time she'd been touched that way. The hand clasping hers feels like the one she had clasped before it had disappeared. 

It hurts. _Oh,_ it hurts. 

A fissure. The cold cannot sustain itself in the wake of the overwhelming emotion she feels in that moment, the rage and the pain, so sharp she cannot breathe. The silence in her head, filled once more with the eternal scream she’d unleashed in the beyond. 

Her face contorts; she feels it. She knows it must show only a tiny fraction of how she feels inside – the cold, the anger, the pain. Tears spill over onto her cheeks and they are cold, too. 

There is no relief to be had in this embrace. She is grateful for the presence of others, yet she resents what this presence means. 

Questions. Conversation. Celebration. 

She wants none of it. 

She fears that if she opens her mouth, even with the best of intentions, the only words that will come out will be _I left him there._

It's not true. She knows. ( _There was nothing to leave.)_

It feels true, though. 

She stumbles back, perhaps more abruptly than she had intended. The cold and the burn and the silence and the scream make her feel like she is losing her grasp on the present moment. She is afraid of what she will do if she remains. 

She knows people are speaking to her. She recognizes concern. None of it triggers any emotional response within her. She is still numb, still cold, still devoid of sentiment of any kind. She is neither happy nor sad. Hopeful nor desolate. She is, instead, nothing. It is as though any semblance of her humanity has vanished along with Ben Solo; sunk deep into the ground of his stone tomb. 

Her breath catches and she is unable to release it. Her hands shake. Finn is talking, his worries still etched on his face, but she cannot hear the words he is forming. The breath she has taken in still refuses to be let out and her heart begins to beat at an accelerated rate. She attempts to intake another breath, in the hopes that this one will release, but instead it results in a croaking gasp and her heart rate increases further. 

Finn takes a step towards her and now Poe has turned back to look at her as well, his own brows drawn, lips parting as though to speak. 

Rey shakes her head once, twice, three times – jerky, halting motions that feel as though her head will be detaching itself from her body in due course. 

She holds up a single hand to stay them and both Finn and Poe flinch. Finn even takes a quick step back, as though recalling the last time she had raised a hand against him and what it had meant for his relationship with gravity. 

_Sorry_ , she wants to say, but still cannot find the breath to form the words. _Sorry for doing it all wrong._

In saving the galaxy, she had lost everything. 

Turning on her heel, she forces herself to cough out the trapped breath in her lungs and make her way for the trees. 

Her ears pop, bringing the sound of the planet fully back to her consciousness – cacophonous, overwhelming, raucous and offensive in its volume. One voice, above the rest:

“ _Rey!_ ” 

The familiar sound of Finn shouting her name echoes through the trees. 

Rey’s stride does not falter even in the slightest. 

* * *

She runs until she can no longer run and then walks until her legs can no longer sustain her. 

Until a step turns into a knee on the ground, and then another. Her hands fly forward to support her landing, sinking into the soft, wet dirt on the ground. She looks down blearily, seeing in her mind’s eye the form of Ben Solo disappearing into this soft earth, same as he disappeared into the callous crackling rock of Exegol. 

The scream in her head has returned, louder this time, louder than it had been before. The jungle moves restlessly around her, birds exiting the trees in droves. It is then she realizes that the scream is no longer in her mind alone. 

She uselessly covers her ears against it, that keening howl of a wounded animal that brings tears to her eyes, as though she is hearing it from an outside source, even as she is unable to control its release from the depths of her cold and broken soul. The sound continues until her voice dies out – even though the emotion behind her cry does not, will not, cannot – and then she slowly sinks further down to the damp ground, burying her face in the wet dirt, inhaling the earthy flora of this living jungle moon, so different from the planet on which she raised herself and the planet from which she just came, both dead things, dead and desolate and devoid of life. 

Here, Rey is surrounded by life; she feels it in every breath, under every fingernail. Every insect that scurries over her hand. Every watchful, wary pair of eyes that observes without approaching. She lies on the jungle floor and feels the essence of every living thing around her. So much life feels cruel; a mockery, now, when she is so consumed by death. 

When the sobs begin, they are heavy and dry, painfully dry; coming from a place too deeply entrenched in the cold, hollow agony of her body to produce the mercy of actual tears like before. They provide neither comfort nor relief; merely a way of expelling some of the emotion that threatens to consume her entirely. 

She stays that way, one with the humid earth, until the rotation of the jungle moon around Ajara indicates a night cycle is beginning. She waits even longer, until the atmosphere darkens further, and then forces herself up to begin the stumbling, onerous walk back to base. 

She moves slowly, no desire or incentive to be reunited with familiar faces when there’s only one face she cares to see and it’s a face she knows she’ll never see again. 

At the last minute, just before approaching the clearing that she knows will deliver her to her friends, her “found family” – a phrase that is supposed to provide comfort, to alleviate the prevailing sense of isolation that has dogged her all her life, but instead feels hollow and meaningless in the wake of what she has just experienced – she veers left and makes her way through the copse of trees where she’d landed Luke's X-Wing. 

She pads silently towards the ship and hops stealthily into the cockpit, snatching what she had intended to, before softly landing on her feet again. 

The Base is quiet and still, all signs of revelry gone. She assumes that celebrations were cut short, out of respect for the passing of their general. The thought of Leia brings another lump to her throat. 

Consumed by death. She inhales and exhales death. It is all she knows now. 

As she moves quickly away again from the Base, she throws the soft material in her hands up and over her head. She imagines it’s still warm from his body, though more likely it’s from sitting in the humid atmosphere all day. Tugging it over her shoulders, putting her arms through the sleeves, she wraps herself up in it like a cloth embrace. Her breath comes out in shaky heaves as she picks up her pace, walking quicker as she wraps her arms tighter around herself. 

It smells like he did in those last moments. Charged, sulphuric, the scent of that cursed planet, but underneath something else. It was not a scent she could place as being one particular thing over another, but it was a scent that was wholly identifiable as his. Enveloped in it as she was, it reminded her of being ensconced in his arms, feeling the breadth of his hand span her back, his arms tighten over her ribs. In that moment, that solitary, cruelly fleeting moment, she’d had everything she had ever wanted. It had been the realization of a hope that she had all but abandoned. 

The belonging she had sought. 

She lets out a hoarse sob.

And it had been taken from her, the way everything else was. The way it had always been.

The dense jungle clears suddenly and she realizes with a start that she has walked straight to a precipice overlooking a vast body of water. The moons shine in the sky and again in the dark churning waters as a breeze blows sweetly across her face, feeling like a punishment and an absolution all at once. 

It is beautiful and she doesn't want beauty. It's a reminder of time and transience and she doesn't want that either. 

She wants nothing, except for one thing. 

She'd thought she’d known loneliness before. The years on Jakku. Touching the reflective surface of the cave on Ahch-To. Aching for her parents. For answers. 

She is off Jakku now. She has her answers. 

And _this_ loneliness, the loneliness of lost opportunity, of a future foretold but never realized, this is the most unbearable thing of all. 

She drops to her knees, then her hands. 

_I left him there_.

The words haunt her again and she wraps her arms around her mid-section, keeling over with the hollow, frigid agony of it. 

_I left him there._

She thinks of how she’d felt, dying in the static-charged dirt, alone. Secure enough with the knowledge that she had done the right thing; been the hero. But so very, very scared of what lay beyond. 

So terrified, in fact, that once she did finally pass through, manifesting within a glittering eternity of stars, the first and only thing she'd done was howl – a helpless, petrified scream of isolated horror. Thinking she'd been doomed to a hereafter reminiscent of the loneliness she'd experienced in life, this time with stars replacing the sand. 

_Had Ben Solo been afraid?_ she wonders, aching, her forehead touching the ground. _Was he there now, too? In that cold infinity of stars?_

The thought of him _being_ somewhere gives her pause. 

It reminds her of the voices she'd heard in her mind, some she'd recognized and some she hadn't, just before destroying the Sith Fleet. She thinks of her mantra; the words she’d used to call on the Force, the peace within, the voices from beyond. 

She sits straight up. 

It’s a fool’s hope, she knows. One of her greatest struggles has always been centering herself; finding the voices of those who had come before her, to help guide and support her in her journey. A part of her had always felt closed off from that sort of assistance. Unworthy, perhaps – as though she had always known, even at a subconscious level, that all was not well with her relationship with the Force. 

She tries to push the inherent insecurities down and focus on the task at hand. If – and it’s a big if – but _if_ he is reachable, _if_ she can somehow get to him—

She has to try. 

Closing her eyes, she evens her breathing. Plants her hands in the dirt to try and centre herself further, knees bent underneath her. 

Each breath is shaky as she feels the significance of this moment in her bones. Feels that, were it to fail, it would be a profound loss all over again. One she’s not sure she can survive this time. 

“B—” It’s guttural. A croak, coming from somewhere within her that surpasses voice and sound. It doesn’t sound like her, but nothing sounds like her now, anyway. She swallows hard and tries again. 

“Be—” Raspy, still, but clearer. “Be with—me.” An unexpected sob releases. 

“Be with me.” Another sob. She feels twin tears streak down her cheeks. It starts to feel like a great thaw, the permafrost within softening slightly, even as her heart fills with dread at the prospect of a continuation of this cruel, deafening silence. 

The words come out faster, pleading. 

“ _Be with me_. Ben. Ben.” Her nails dig into the ground, dirt embedding underneath them. She is full-on sobbing now, eyes and nose running. “ _Be with me_.” It’s a wail, a plea. “Ben, _please_.” 

_You said I wasn’t alone_. 

It’s childish, she knows, recalling those words he had uttered so long ago. It feels selfish, knowing all he’d suffered, knowing the sacrifice he’d made to ensure that she’d lived. 

More selfish is that she doesn’t want it. She doesn’t want his sacrifice. She doesn’t want to be here, if he is not. 

She takes a deep breath and tries to compose herself, to centre herself. To be the Jedi that she is not. To fight against the rage that threatens to consume her. The rage that makes up the baser part of who she is. 

“Be—”

She cuts herself off abruptly. 

Something has shifted. She feels it. Miniscule, almost imperceptible, but there nonetheless. A sound, a sensation, like a faint whisper in her ear. 

Like a light reappearing under the crack of a door. 

She opens her eyes slowly and it feels like they’re opening for the first time. 

The whispering is louder now, though still unclear. It sounds like many voices all at once, talking, maybe arguing? It escalates, like the progressive sound of waves crashing on the shore, and then it stops abruptly. 

She is staring at a familiar pair of black boots. 

Her jaw slackens as her eyes trail up the boots, up a pair of trouser-clad legs, to a soft-looking, dark sweater. A circle of white – no. Her heart clenches. A hole. A medium-sized hole, exposed flesh interrupting the swath of black. Her hand comes up unconsciously, touches the hole in her own soft, black sweater. She feels sickening remorse, knowing what caused it. 

The figure in front of her shifts and she feels two, maybe three fingertips graze her cheek, down her jaw, and under her chin. 

She looks up then, into the face that she both expects and yet is stunned to see. 

_Ben_. 

Her breathing has escalated and she feels dizzy, off-kilter, like someone is playing a cruel joke on her and she is moments away from losing everything once more. The shallow gasps mist the cool night air around them as she stares and stares, as though her eyes are devouring his face in case he slips away again, before her mind even realizes what she’s doing. 

He looks the same to her now as he did in life, solid and large, emanating strength and heat, while also guarding a sort of vulnerability that only she could ever pinpoint, reflected from the depths of his gaze. 

It was him. It was _truly_ him. Her thin breaths turn into a sort of pant that resembles laughter, as the cold begins to recede ever so slightly. 

He quirks a quizzical smile at her, just a softening of the corner of his mouth really, as she dissolves into more laughter, her hand coming up to touch those soft and smiling lips, to guide them to hers, _just once more—_

It is that unfortunate moment, however, when her body decides it can no longer withstand the measures of the day, and her mind blinks into darkness. 

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/delia_pavorum) for fic updates, tweetfics, RTs of the things I like, complaints about the things I don't, and more spectacular nonsense. You can also find me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/delia-pavorum).


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